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I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.

Gus Van Sant

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Gus Van Sant
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 24
Actor
Director
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Musician
Photographer
Screenwriter
Louisville
Kentucky
Gus Greene Van Sant Junior
Drama
Animal
Ideas
Everything
Different
Good
Arranging
Documentary
Documentaries

More quotes by Gus Van Sant

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The rules of suspense are that you do know, and you just don't know when. In the Hitchcock rules of suspense, you are supposed to know that there is a bomb on the bus that might blow up, and then it becomes very tense - but if you don't know that there's a bomb and it just blows up, then it's just a surprise.
Gus Van Sant
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I think that in some cases, I've made films that have a sentimental quality, at least as part of the film.
Gus Van Sant
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Apparently there’s this kind of songbird that thinks it dies every time the sun goes down. In the morning, when it wakes up, it’s totally shocked to still be alive—so it sings this really beautiful song.
Gus Van Sant
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Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is ananathema to these idiots. I predict that in the near future, right wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus.
Gus Van Sant
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I'm usually trying to react to what the actors are coming up with. And then the environment, and then the story.
Gus Van Sant
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I'm not being analytical. I just create everything intuitively. If you're too analytical, what you're doing probably ends up being too specific.
Gus Van Sant
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Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don't get to think, you only get to receive information.
Gus Van Sant
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The biopic also wasn't a form that I necessarily believed in, because you can never really get it right, you know? It's also a form that's very popular - the straight-ahead biopic.
Gus Van Sant
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I have this new theory about films. It's almost like astrology, where if we started on a Tuesday the film will be different than if we started on a Wednesday. Not because of the planets. It's that sometimes you start with the wrong balance and the whole thing gets messed up.
Gus Van Sant
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The dark comedies tend to be in a non-releasable area. There can be romantic comedies. There can be dramas. But there's no 'dark comedy' inbox for the advertising.
Gus Van Sant
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I've told people who have just started to make a film that the one thing you might experience is this feeling that everybody is conspiring against you, because you're not necessarily able to tell what's real and what's not.
Gus Van Sant
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The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.
Gus Van Sant
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And Later I Thought, I Can't Think How Anyone Can Become a Director Without Learning the Craft of Cinematography.
Gus Van Sant
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When I grew up in the '60s, we were actually dominated by this, you know, sort of conforming '50s culture, even though we were like trying to express our own culture, like, the dominant culture was the thing that was forming us. And I think that that's true today.
Gus Van Sant
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A lot of times, you're not necessarily off the page because you haven't been able to take the time to prepare a character. It's very easy to find even great actors reading it more like a reading. Things aren't really coming alive yet, even though you know they will.
Gus Van Sant
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I knew about Heatmiser, and I saw them one time at Pine Street [later changed to La Luna], which was the center of a lot of alternative bands during the 80s. But I didn't really know too much about their music.
Gus Van Sant
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If a movie isn't released, it's one thing, but if you know it will be, it's nice to have closure and see it come out.
Gus Van Sant
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I think over the course of 14 films, I'm returning to a place that I know to tell a story... the same way Spielberg returned to fantasy, Lucas returned to the 'Star Wars' saga, or John Ford returned to the western.
Gus Van Sant
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Upon entering my vein, the drug would start a warm edge that would surge along until the brain consumed it in a gentle explosion.It began in the back of the neck and rose rapidly until I felt such pleasure that the world sympathizing took on a soft, lofty appeal.
Gus Van Sant
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Digital information, for every type of storage, is unfounded. If everything is on a hard drive and the hard drive freezes up, your whole photography collection could just go away. We can still look at printed photographs of our grandparents. We can physically hold them in our hands and look at it.
Gus Van Sant